Running out of time? Turn to Titles

Much like life in general, there is seemingly never enough time to accomplish everything you aspire to achieve in every search engine optimization project. When there is great disparity between the sheer size of a client’s website and the amount of contracted hours that you don’t know where to begin, focus on the areas that are guaranteed to have an impact.

Here at Blue Traffic we handle websites of all sizes, from a dozen pages to several thousand pages. Similarly, we honor a variety of agreements, from a few hours of SEO work a month to projects that require several hours a week the entire year round. Ideally, you could devote several hours to each individual page, affording you ample time to conduct satisfactory keyword research,  rewrite page titles, develop informed unique content, and maybe even sprinkle a few internal links there within.

That, of course, is the ideal scenario. And as any internet marketer will attest, few projects are accompanied by ideal circumstances.

Thus, when only limited hours can be spread across a colossal project, it’s imperative you diligently assign your time to worthwhile tasks. Last year, Stephen Spencer of Netconcepts authored an article about “Thin Slicing” that is, in my opinion, the key to achieving impressive results when time is of the essence.

The more things change the more they stay the same, as the saying goes, and from my professional experience, this holds true in search engine optimization. Even despite the mind-boggling innovation taking place in the Google and Microsoft search departments, a few primary factors continue to dictate organic rankings. That isn’t to say the other strategies don’t work - because many of them do - but a select few have a greater impact in the grand scheme of things.

Chief among them is the almighty albeit unspectacular page title. There are hundreds of proven SEO strategies and one hundred times as many opinions of what truly works. However, when time is short and you have no room  for bold experimentation, take some advice from Stephen Spencer and focus on the paramount impact area – page titles.

Like in cinema and literature, a good title can yield lucrative results, even if there is no substance behind the name. In the search engine arena, a good title will garner you improved rankings and hopefully increased web traffic. Even if there are thousands of titles to be edited and no time to plug in keywords to find that ideal fit for each page, merely reviewing the makeup of a page, taking an educated guess, and plugging that in as the new title will be more beneficial than having hundreds or thousands of generic or redundant page titles working against one another.

So when the clock is ticking toward zero, turn to your clutch playmaker - the page title.